Zombie Week: Me & Zombie, Sitting in a Tree [don't gasp, I decapitate in the end]

In this post I decided to chill a bit and let my thoughts out from the stables and in the lush green fields to do whatever thoughts do best, roam free as a river. So Zombie Week is full swing, which I promise to check out in full detail, when this hellish week is over with, but I want to slow down a bit with the festivities and just ramble about zombies, me and my love with these horrifying creatures.

I had no inkling about what exactly to talk about in this post about zombies, until CJ asked a great question in the comment section on my Gallery post on Sunday. Why do I love zombies? It’s not an easy thing to answer and my comment reply was a very clumsy attempt or at least a very slimmed down version. My introduction to zombies came somewhere around my sixth or perhaps it was my eight year, pretty early in adolescence. My father was watching a horror movie with the undead in a hospital and after seeing a very bloody bathroom and shuffling nurses, I immediately developed a phobia of the dark and hospitals as well ill lit rooms, while zombies continued to haunt me. I had very Romero style dreams, where I stayed asleep long enough to know for sure I became zombie munchies.

Way to go, dad. In this case though I might thank him, because after all zombies are awesome.

But in spite of this condition I returned to zombies like a very stupid moth with accelerated healing factor to a very powerful electric lantern. I guess to a point I liked to be scared and to be honest I still have no recollection of any cognitive decision on why I would willingly scare the crap out of myself. As I began to write more, read more and think more on why people did things for story purposes I began to discover why I had this masochistic love-terror exchange with zombies. For one I built resilience to this and soon the nights didn’t seem so scary, because I got used to zombies. I wasn’t scared of blood and gore on television and I certainly could stomach some in real life. This is highly individual though, since zombies are my personal phobia and story of overcoming them and then beginning to enjoy the stories behind them. Different people have their personal boogeyman that may be rooted in reality or in fiction.

However what people cannot deny is that the zombie is one of the scariest monsters and a wide for interpretation symbol and metaphor. I have been speaking about the zombie as the reflection of the consumer behavior in rendering people generic in their unity to mindlessly buy more and more without considering whether they really need what they buy or not. This is the flesh eating behavior in zombies that wander aimlessly and eat whenever they get the chance as much as possible until everything is gone. However this consumerism behavior is killing not only individualism, but creativity as people are preoccupied with buying choosing and replacing items they already possess with newer models, because trends demand it and what’s society than not one big trend. I’d also go as far as stating that it also whacks off intellect, since we are busy sorting through advertisements and working to buy, buy, buy. And this is reflected in the zombie effortlessly, in its slack eyes and faint shuffle. The zombie captures the fatigue and the hollowness we all get emotionally when we sit down after twelve hours at the work place, turn the TV on and shut our brains out.

All in all zombies are the spokesperson for this century’s vices, which is evident from their rise into popularity in video games, movies and fiction.

PS: Here is a wee treat from my favorite Youtube lady, Venetian Princess: